WHEN SUMMER was over, the physical demands let up, but the academic demands set in. It was an extensive and difficult core curriculum. No matter your major, you had to take a large number of courses in basic sciences—electrical engineering, thermodynamics, mechanical engineering, chemistry. We also took courses in philosophy, law, and English literature. In retrospect, I am grateful for the education, but at the time, the course load felt staggering.
Luckily, for those of us who so badly wanted to fly, there were just enough perks to keep us motivated.
My first ride in a military jet was during freshman year, in a Lockheed T-33, which dated back to the late 1940s. The plane had a bubble canopy and went about five hundred miles an hour. It was typical of jets from that era; the aerodynamic technology had outpaced the propulsion technology. It was well into the 1950s before jet engines were designed to produce enough thrust to fully take advantage of the strides in aerodynamics.
So this old T-33 was underpowered. Still, it was an incredible thrill to be in it.
Each new cadet was taken for a forty-five-minute ride, and the purpose was to give us an incentive to work hard so we wouldn’t drop out of the academy.
This was the first time I’d ever worn a parachute, helmet, and oxygen mask, the first time I had ever been seated on an ejection seat. The officer piloting the plane did a roll, then headed ten miles west of Colorado Springs and flew over Pikes Peak upside down. My stomach was rock solid through all of it. I was so engaged in the moment. I was just eating it all up. I knew that, no matter what, this was what I wanted to do with my life.
When the forty-five minutes were up, of course, it was back to reality. The hazing awaited us on the ground.
We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Mitchell Hall, sitting at rectangular tables of ten. Each table had a mix of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. We freshmen had to sit rigidly at attention, our backs straight, our eyes only on our plates. We had to lift our forks to our mouths in a robotic fashion, and we were not allowed to look beyond the food in front of us. We weren’t allowed to talk to one another. Only when an upperclassman addressed us, asking us a question, could we speak. They would spend mealtime quizzing us, and we had to shout out our answers.
We each had been given a book called
The Code of Conduct, established by President Eisenhower in 1955, was considered vital because during the Korean War, American POWs had been forced through torture to collaborate. The term in those days was that they’d been “brainwashed.” And so the military came up with specific rules of conduct, and we were expected to memorize them all. As future officers, for instance, we had to vow: “I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have means to resist.” We could surrender only in the face of “certain death.” We had to repeat key lines from the code: “If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.”
Mealtime became increasingly stressful because the upperclassmen were relentless in their demands. We had to memorize the details about a great number of airplanes. We were expected to know foreign policy, American and world history, and sports scores from the day before. We had to be able to rattle off the full names of all the upperclassmen at the table, including their middle initials, and their hometowns. Now, forty years later, many of those names and middle initials remain seared into my head. I remember the hometowns, too.
The degree of harassment awaiting you at mealtime depended on your daily table assignment. Walking into the dining hall, if you saw you were seated with a kindhearted senior, you were relieved. But if one of the seniors sitting at your table was a notorious hard-ass, your heart would sink. You knew dinner would be excruciating.
In that case, you hoped for one of two things: Either another freshman cadet at your table would be so pathetically hopeless at memorization that the upperclassmen would focus on him, which meant they’d leave you alone and you could eat. Or else you hoped that one of your freshman tablemates was a genius or had a photographic memory—someone who got everything right. When upperclassmen came upon a know-it-all, they’d focus all their energies on stumping him, finding the one question he couldn’t answer, and then giving him hell for his wrong response. When that happened, the rest of us were ignored and got to eat.
THERE WAS one upperclassman, a year older than I was, who wasn’t vindictive about his hazing. But he knew exactly how to make his point.
One day, we were getting ready to march to the noon meal. It was a warm morning and we were in short sleeves. I was standing at attention, and he came up to me, asking if I thought I’d done a good job polishing my black uniform shoes.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“How confident are you?” he asked.
“Sir, I am very confident,” I answered. (I wasn’t allowed to say: “
This upperclassman decided to make this into a challenge. “Are you willing to match shines?” he asked. My shoes versus his.
“Yes, sir.”
He defined our rules of engagement: “If you are confident that you have a better shine than I do, and it turns out you are right, then I will make your bed tomorrow. If my shoes have a better shine, then you’ll make my bed as well as your own.”
All of us, including the upperclassmen, had to make our own beds using hospital corners. We had to pull our sheets and blankets tight enough so they wouldn’t show any wrinkles. The test was to drop a quarter on the bed. If the quarter didn’t bounce, we’d have to pull off all the bedding and start again. It was no fun. So if this upperclassman made my bed the next day, it would be wonderful.
He gave me permission to stop looking straight ahead, and to look down at my shoes and then at his. Our shoes seemed equally shiny. But I chose to be bold. “Sir, I win,” I told him.
“Well, it’s pretty close,” he responded, “but we’re not finished yet. Let’s compare the soles of our shoes.”
He stood on one foot, allowing me to see his instep, the arched middle section between the heel and the ball of the shoe. The leather on each of his insteps had been polished to a sheen. My insteps, of course, were not. He was like a good trial lawyer who never asks a question without knowing the answer. He had set me up.
“Sir, you win,” I said. He saw my lips turn into the hint of a grin, and even though doolies weren’t allowed to smile while in formation, he cut me some slack by not calling me on it.
There were plenty of other times I had to stifle my smile.
While marching in basic training, we were required to take turns counting off in cadence: “Left, left… left, right, left…”
Early on in my life, I noticed that accomplished people on TV, especially newscasters such as NBC veterans Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, enunciated perfectly and seemed to have no real accents. I tried to sound more like them, and less like some of the people in my town, who had thick Texas accents. So when it was my job to count off in cadence, I don’t think the other cadets could hear Texas in my voice.
But there was one fellow doolie, Dave, who came from West Texas—and you knew it every time he opened his mouth. Whenever he led us, he would count off in cadence: “Lay-uff, lay-uff… lay-uff, raah-yut, lay-uff…”
I’d chuckle inside, but my face remained expressionless as we marched around. “Lay-uff, lay-uff… lay-uff, raah-yut, lay-uff…”
We were truly a melting pot at the academy, and sometimes it felt like the cliched casting in a World War II movie. We had the guy with a Polish name from Chicago, the Texan, the Jewish kid from one of the boroughs in New York, a guy from Portland, Oregon.
It’s funny, the things you remember.
When my daughter Kate entered high school in the fall of 2007, Lorrie and I went to back-to-school night, and her math teacher looked familiar to me. As he spoke, it hit me: He was two years ahead of me at the Air Force Academy. He had been one of the upperclassmen asking me mealtime questions my freshman year. So after his presentation, I walked up to him and said: “Fast, neat, average, friendly, good, good.” He looked at my face and he had a flash of recognition, too. He knew exactly what I was saying.
